there are days when the thoughts are never quiet. they buzz around your ears like so many bees - no, like mosquitoes. because at least bees pollinate and diversify, open up new paths and possibilities, while mosquitoes only serve to suck the life out of a body and leave swollen, scratchy lumps behind.

there are days when you shake your head so hard and so often that it aches, and it feels like your brain is rattling inside your skull, a loose cog unfitting with the rest. days when you have to remind yourself to cut your nails short, days when your cheeks sting and legs bruise under the weight of self-recrimination.

these are days when you can only straighten your back and grit your teeth, stare straight ahead over the heads of others because however much those self-help websites tell you to face your fears, avoidance is for now a better method than some.

there are days when the things you love most in the world are corrupted, torn and twisted from their original states like morgoth did with the first of the orcs, who were tortured and warped and defiled from elves. days when the thoughts, voiceless and yet so, so unbelievably loud, will whisper and coax and mutter in your ears like the one ring did in the ears of the ringbearer, and in the ears of a pitiful creature who lived for five hundred long years in the dark with only nameless shadows and fish for company.

and sometimes, all you can do on days like these is glare defiance at the unspeakable images behind your eyelids and think, you have no power here. who knew saruman could be so quotable?